Donald Trump returned to power in large part through a campaign of scapegoating, promising to rescue his supporters from the immigrants and transgender people who he claimed endangered America. That these MAGA-designated outgroups posed no threat to the country was no obstacle, so long as Trumpworld found new ways to pitch that narrative and keep it going in ever more distorted forms. Thus arrived last week a chilling new report from the Department of Health and Human Services that attempts to paint support for trans people as an “ideological accelerant” capable of directing the left toward political violence.
Titled “Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?,” the “study” was something that the department had “commissioned,” according to an August 26 press release. HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Brian Christine said the publication “raises important questions” and that “the association between sex-rejecting clinical beliefs, authoritarian attitudes, and the justification of political violence warrant serious scientific scrutiny.” Here, the department has unwittingly raised another “important” question: Why has HHS decided to commit public resources to investigate an alleged “association” between support for transgender people and political violence? That question demands actually serious scrutiny.
Don’t mistake this publication for science. Functionally, it has more in common with the president’s anti-trans and anti-left executive orders than it does with any scientific paper subject to peer review. Its authors position the report as an intervention, countering existing literature that regards “opposition towards ‘gender affirming’ norms” as “a symptom of prejudice,” as well as challenging work that “assumed” that “authoritarianism was primarily a right-wing phenomenon.” This is not much more than a lightly sourced remix of common right-wing talking points, amounting to the same old thing: Have you considered that the right are unfairly painted as bigots, when it’s the left that are the real aggressors?
It makes sense that in commissioning this report, then, HHS turned to think-tank fellows whose other work aligns with the administration’s goals, specifically its broad campaign to characterize the left—and queer and trans people, in particular—as a security threat or as domestic terrorists. One of the authors, Colin Wright, hails from both the right-wing Manhattan Institute and the anti-trans group Genspect’s own think tank, the Killarney Group. Genspect is a leading player in an international network of anti-trans groups known for using pseudoscience to undermine efforts to protect the health and rights of trans people. Another report author, Joel Finkelstein, is the co-founder of the Network Contagion Research Institute, or NCRI, which has repeatedly sought to link the left with ”extremism,” including by espousing false equivalencies between political violence from the left and the right. Finkelstein is the only author disclosed as an NCRI affiliate, but the three other authors have co-authored previous NCRI reports (such as “The Corruption of the American Mind” and “Instructing Animosity: How DEI Pedagogy Produces the Hostile Attribution Bias”). However, they are identified in the HHS report only as being affiliated with Rutgers University—with which NCRI is itself affiliated.
It is not surprising, given these authors, that the report recalls earlier Network Contagion Research Institute work; as respectably as it may be packaged, it delivers content ready to drive right-wing news cycles. One 2024 NCRI report warned that diversity, equity, and inclusion programs “may implicitly or explicitly characterize members of so-called ‘dominant’ groups—or those who disagree with ‘anti-oppressive,’ ‘anti-racist,’ or contemporary ‘anti-fascist’ frameworks—as oppressive, racist, or fascist.” (Four of the five authors of the HHS report worked on that one.) Another NCRI report on “militant anarcho-socialist networks” from 2020, which shares two co-authors with the HHS report, included subheads like, “ACAB-LINKED MEMES APPEAR WITH CLEAR CALLS FOR VIOLENCE VIRTUALLY AND ARE USED TO SYMBOLICALLY OUST STATE AUTHORITY AND MARK TERRITORY IN THE REAL WORLD.” (ACAB, of course, is international shorthand for “All Cops Are Bastards.”) Lately, NCRI has accused the Democratic Socialists of America of being a “foreign agent”—dovetailing nicely with Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s own attempts to drag DSA into his vintage midcentury anti-Communist crusade.
To be clear: The publication of this anti-trans report is not a case of decent, evidence-minded experts at HHS being deceived. The agency’s Assistant Secretary for Health Brian Christine, who promoted the report, and whose X profile includes a banner reading “Make America Healthy Again,” regularly promotes medical misinformation about transition popularized by anti-trans groups. On August 13, promoting another recent HHS “commissioned” report, called “Wolves in White Coats,” Christine accused providers of gender-affirming care of having “mutilated, and then cast aside,” children “for profit and politics.” In fact, Christine was a speaker at a 2026 Genspect lobby day in Washington. That HHS turned to someone who works for some of those same anti-trans groups to produce this latest “study” also, unfortunately, tracks.
The new HHS report does do something quite unique, however, even as it recalls both historic Red and Lavender scares: It provides the appearance of a scientific basis for the administration’s obsession with connecting what it calls “gender ideology” with political violence. Here, I’m using its terminology only because it speaks to an umbrella category that doesn’t quite have an affirmative term. In essence, the administration is referring to people who are trans and those who defend trans people. This is the cohort the authors attempted to capture in their whopping sample of 1,208 participants, who were recruited through a platform on which people are paid to take surveys. (I reached out to the report’s co-principal investigators through Rutgers University, with which they as well as NCRI are affiliated, but received no response.) Through that platform, respondents were asked to do essentially two surveys: one to evaluate what the authors called “endorsement of ‘gender-affirming’ norms” and one about their support for “left-wing authoritarianism.” Taken together, the authors claimed, the results “suggest that gender ideology is associated with [left-wing authoritarianism] and willingness to justify political violence.” To say that one thing suggests an association with another thing is certainly a sentence that suggests such an association—but it’s not a finding.
The report HHS published does not prove that “gender ideology” radicalizes people; it demonstrates only that the administration is trying to make that case, and that’s why this is so chilling. Unfortunately, this report is not the only evidence of the administration’s aims. In Trump’s blitz of executive orders after he returned to office last January, one of the first was titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” At the same time, Trump issued his pardons of January 6 rioters. Altogether, the administration would now position trans people, not Trump supporters, as the “real” extremists.
Since then, the administration has only accelerated its efforts to link trans people and violent extremism. In the Justice Department’s attempts to prosecute people for resisting Immigration and Customs Enforcement, among those charged in some of the highest-profile cases, trans people are vastly overrepresented. Take, for instance, the Prairieland cases, which resulted in multiple trans and nonbinary activists sentenced to decades in prison, as well as the Spokane 3 cases, in which one ICE agent’s transphobic posts on X were revealed. Then there is NSPM-7, a national security memo issued by Trump nearly one year ago, which attempts to define as “domestic terrorists” people who espouse “extremism on migration, race, and gender,” as well as “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” The new White House counterterrorism strategy, released in May, pledges to “prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.” It also claims that Charlie Kirk was killed by “a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.”
There is more, and worse—much of which is not worth dignifying, like the right’s immediate attempts to claim each new mass shooter as trans, or the Heritage Foundation pressuring the FBI to designate what it calls “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violence and Extremism” as domestic terrorism.
The propaganda that pulls it all together, however, comes from White House and Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller, who spoke this July on “the resurgence of political terrorism.” Miller did not name trans people directly, but given all of the above, how the administration has worked to collapse “the left” and “trans people” and “extremists,” it is hard not to read gender in this screed. I apologize for quoting from it at length, but keep in mind: These are the words of the White House and of Homeland Security at what was supposed to be a counterterrorism event.
“The leftist looks at a perfect family with a perfect life and a perfect job and perfect kids that goes to church every Sunday and is filled with a feeling of inadequacy and jealousy, and they covet,” Miller began. “It’s not a coincidence that when you look at these violent antifa demonstrations, you see any photograph of those who were assembled—to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way—in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism.” He went on: “Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance, in many different ways, to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.”
Then Miller invoked the opposite of the “deformed”: “Trust your instincts—to all people and across all civilizations. You know what normal is. You know what beautiful is. You know what good is,” he said, sounding like a children’s book. “You know that children are precious and beautiful and must be protected.” Protected from what? When the “violent leftist” sees all that normal, beautiful goodness, Miller said, “that burns an ember in them, and that’s how you end up with the horrors we’ve seen throughout history, where good families are dragged out into the street and executed.” He was asking without asking: What wouldn’t you want us to do, if it could save your children?
That sentiment is the true backdrop to the publication of this HHS report: not only the acceleration of anti-trans misinformation and bad science but the pattern of scapegoating trans people and anyone who defends them. As with other Trump administration attacks on trans people, the report didn’t have to be well executed or even believable to work as designed. As much as anything voiced by Trump or Miller, the report functions as propaganda, built on a question that can’t produce an answer, only dehumanization and fear.
Hence then, the article about trump s vile campaign to link trans people and political violence was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Trump’s Vile Campaign to Link Trans People and Political Violence )
Also on site :
- Martha Stewart’s ‘Beautiful’ Cotton Floral Comforter Set Is a Cottagecore Dream, and It’s Nearly 60% Off
- Nigeria confirms US troop withdrawal
- Quote of the Day: Anne Rice Sold 150 Million Books—and Credited This Famous Writer With Inspiring Her To Never ‘Water It Down’